Patient monitoring is an important part of healthcare. A major challenge in patient monitoring is to achieve high sensitivity combined with high specificity, in other words the ability to reliably detect events or features of interest whilst minimizing false positive detections.
Many medical monitoring devices are configured to generate alarms in response to a detected change in the status of the patient (subject), the purpose of which is to indicate to medical staff that the subject may need urgent attention. However; various circumstances can lead to an alarm being generated when the subject is not in need of attention, and these alarms are therefore considered to be false alarms. Studies show that the majority of false alarms are caused by nursing care (e.g. activities such as suctioning, repositioning, oral care, and/or washing of the subject) or by voluntary movements or interactions with the monitoring equipment by the subject.
False alarms are undesirable because they waste the time of healthcare professionals in responding to them, and can create “alarm fatigue”, in which caregivers become desensitized to alarms and can begin to ignore or even disable the alarm generation functions of medical monitoring devices. The generation of an excessive number of false alarms by medical monitoring equipment can therefore jeopardize subject safety.
There is therefore a need for a system which can reduce the number of false alarms generated by medical monitoring systems, without missing genuine alarms.